Collective Molecule Formation in a Degenerate Fermi Gas via a Feshbach Resonance

Abstract
We model collisionless collective conversion of a degenerate Fermi gas of atoms into bosonic molecules via a Feshbach resonance, treating the bosonic molecules as a classical field and seeding the pairing amplitudes with random phases. A dynamical instability of the Fermi sea against association with molecules drives the conversion. The model qualitatively reproduces several experimental observations [Regal et al., Nature (London) 424, 47 (2003)]. We predict that the initial temperature of the Fermi gas sets the limit for the efficiency of atom-molecule conversion.
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